“Writer & Director” from “Aquifer” is our thirteenth grid for this season.

Stats: 53 solvers attempted this puzzle.  38 solvers completed the puzzle and the bonus forms. As many as 32 solvers got the full score.

Here is the Grid:
(Annotations will be visible on solving the puzzle or on clicking “Reveal Grid”. Logged in solvers can see their submissions as well)

Bonus Questions:

1. Who is the writer referred to in the title?
   
   Solution

   Ans: Daphne Du Maurier

2. Who is the director referred to in the title?
   
   Solution

   Ans: Alfred Hitchcock

3. 3 films that are collaborations between the writer and the director
   
   Solution

   Ans: Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, The Birds

Here’s the list of Top Scorers (For the full list, please check the Leaderboard in the Hall of Fame)

Out of 53 solvers,  38 completed fully and 32  got the full score. Each of the following scored 141 points (Grid Score – 136,  Bonus – 5).

Arun Hiregange
Ashit Hegde
Bill MacDonald
Debasmita Basu
Harish T K
Himanshu Rajurkar
Ian VanderSchee
Jose A
Koteswar Rao
Krittibas Dasgupta
Lakshmi Prakash
Madhup Tewari
Madhusudan H
Max Jackson
Mona Sogal
Mukundala Balasubramanyam
Nagendra Prasad R.
Narayanan R
Narayanaswamy D.
Paul Henderson
Prakash Arumugam
Priya Shyam
Ramki Krishnan
Ratna Rao
Samit Kallianpur
Sampath Srinivasan
Samraat Saxena
Sparsh Sinha
Supriya Mithal
Veera Raghavan
Venkatesan P.
Venkatraghavan S

Congrats to the toppers and to all the solvers who participated.

Grid Rating: The puzzle got a good rating of 8.5. It was rated a perfect 10 by 9 out of the 38 folks who voted (24%). The lowest rating was 6.

Favourite Clues:  The Top clues were

1. 10A Eliminates x and y, for instance (4) – 10 votes
2. 4D Need that bubbly after everything else (2, 3, 3) – 9 votes
3. 30A Without a century? That’s unacceptable! (3, 2) – 7 votes
4. 8A & 24D New cops enlist with department for a very short time (5, 6) – 7 votes
5. 13A Old Ashes captain dismisses last four, retaining urn (3) -6 votes
6. 12A & 21A Strung up and sozzled Hillary skips a peak in Ireland (6, 4) – 6 votes
7. 3D One in asylum possibly guarded by tipsy chowkidar (6) – 6 votes

Thanks Aquifer for the wonderful themed grid. Took me down the memory lane of a favourite writer – director combination and some all time great movies, being an ardent fan of both. Great fun.

PS: The solvers comments are in the comments thread in the post itself.